A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

This chapter, to be included in "Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology," edited by P.A. Mussen, deals with the connection between the acquisition of language and the growth of intellect, and the connection between both of these and the process of maturation. The author feels that various theories of development cannot account for the child's…

Three principles are integral to any reading theory which provides reading teachers and researchers with the linguistic explanatory power required by linguistic theory. A clear understanding of language is dependent on the knowledge of what language is and how it works. There is an important distinction between competence and performance; most…

Substitutes in English (such as "he,""she,""it,""one,""do so,""thus,""there," and "such") participate in an intricate network of systems. This study aims to identify those English substitutes which are words or word sequences and to describe their workings in some of…

The paper demonstrates the possibility of deriving, from the Correlational Grammar developed solely for the purpose of automatic sentence analysis, a classification of words that could be useful in language analysis and language teaching. A group of some 90 frequent English adjectives serves as example; they are sorted into ten classes according…

This paper is part of a current dissertation project exploring the relationships between constructs in linguistic theory and pattern of language behavior in aphasic adults. The author feels that linguists have done little enough work in the area of speech pathology yet they have discussed at length the distinction between competence and…

The value of a transformational model of syntax can be illustrated by comparing the taxonomic grammatical description of a complex sentence to a transformation-oriented description of the same sentence. The taxonomic approach, an immediate constituent analysis, requires 10 steps to break the sample sentence into its grammatical components; the…

Linguistic criticism not only shows students the usefulness of grammar but also improves their comprehension of literature. For instance, a study of stress, pitch, and juncture in E. E. Cummings'"anyone lived in a pretty how town" adds meaning to the poem. Also helpful is an analysis of Cummings' tagmemic method of substitution slot-filling--use…

This study investigated a psycholinguistic model of reading comprehension which attempts to relate readers' conceptual backgrounds to their ability to process syntactic structures. Specifically, the questions addressed involved the interaction between cognitive organizers and active and passive voices of verbs. Subjects included 409 third graders,…

The varied forms and semantic factors of Japanese ordinal expressions are related to one another in a coherent system. In Japanese, the cardinal number form is a numeral compound in construction with a referent. The numeral compound consists of a number and a numeral adjunct. Numeral adjuncts are derived from bound forms, or numeral suffixes, and…

The aim of this paper is to account for some semantic properties of Romanian interrogatives "ce" and "cine" by establishing some definite correlations between various contextual restrictions governing the use of these interrogative particles and the "meaning" which might be assigned to each of these particles in any…

In this paper the bitransitive clause is defined in terms of its nuclear tagmemes: subject, predicate, direct object, and indirect object. A semantic characterization is given of the prototype bitransitive clause with a correlation of situational roles and grammatical functions. The nine different dominant orders in bitransitive clauses which were…

This article argues that QUE-deletion in Montreal French is a syntactic rule, rather than a phonological one, as earlier treatments had claimed. It is divided into five sections: (1) a discussion of why the rule accounting for the alternation of QUE with zero is a deletion, not an insertion rule, (2) a critique of the best known earlier…

To determine the normal sequence of the development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish speakers, ages 2-5, a study of the acquisition of interrogative formation was undertaken. Two male and two females from each of nine age intervals between two and five were selected as informants; all were…

This research concerns the distinction between processes in sentence comprehension and those in sentence memory. Comprehension was monitored by timing subjects while they decided whether a sentence is true or false. The memory process was tapped by examining subject's incidental memory for the sentences they previously verified. The verification…